Event Brief of Q4 2006 Crown Castle International Earnings Conference Call - Part 2.

(From Fair Disclosure Wire)

I guess given the fact that they are newer towers with fewer tenants and less mature, I am just wondering, are you guys just being conservative on the expectations on how fast you will be able to change the leasing characteristics of those towers, and make them look a lot more like your own?

BEN MORELAND: As I said their gross adds were comparable to ours. We have owned them not even four weeks. So yes, forgive us, maybe we are being a little bit conservative, we can frankly afford to be. This guidance is 15% up in EBITDA year-over-year, it's a $100 million. It's $0.32 per share. So we are quite comfortable with that, and you know, you can bet that after probably one to two quarters of really hard integration work, it will take longer than that, but we have got a lot of people working very hard, to bring that level of asset knowledge and quality up to our own standards, so we can deliver those sites for our customers. So all of that sort of combines to say we are very, very pleased with that outlook. We think perhaps you could say it's conservative, I'm not sure I would say that sitting here the first of February. And we will work to accomplish that across the year. ANTHONY KLARMAN: As you look at CapEx, and the size of the portfolio you now have in the United States, one of your peers has been in the press a lot about looking at opportunities in, you know, other sort of higher growth markets. Is that something that you would also consider, in terms of looking for ways to deploy, you know, capital dollars for incremental growth?

BEN MORELAND: Well, I would never rule it out. We have obviously been in other countries before, and we're still in Australia. Australia comparatively continues to grow faster than the U.S. business at the EBITDA line. That is a function of coming off a smaller base primarily. But we still think there is a lot of growth in the U.S., that's why we did the Global Signal transaction, that's why we sent a $1.15 billion buying stock in the last month. We have made our bet in the U.S. market, and we believe we have leveraged the balance sheet to the point where the investor can now get the benefit of what is already, we think, a very dynamic wireless market in the U.S. into substantial growth at the per share line in our Company. That's the play, as John said in his remarks. If you want to make an investment leveraging yourself into wireless growth in the U.S., we think we are the investment to make. ANTHONY KLARMAN: Finally, is there anything else you can provide us with an update with respect to Modio funding status, and kind of how you would view that in terms of capital contributions that might be required to be made during the year?

JOHN KELLY: Anthony, as I mentioned on the last call, what we are doing with Modio is successfully demonstrating the large scale deployment that we have finished up, for all intent and purposes, in the fourth quarter in New York City. And I am pleased to say those that have had the opportunity to use the service, are in fact excited about it. We have been able to assemble a nice content line up, with companies that are interested in working on a trial basis with us and the trial participants. And the experience that people otherwise seeing on this is in fact consistent with what we knew was the case, notwithstanding the disinformation that had been put in the market by some, about what BVBH at 16.70, could or could not do. That said, we have also been rather consistent in the message, which was that our largest CapEx spend on this was going to be finished in 2006, because we were finishing New York, and the work around additional Top 30 markets, where we had essentially done land banking on it, until such time as we now work with prospective partners that are all being provided with units to use the service, find out for themselves how well it works, work through the economics of the network build, and different models on a retail distribution. It doesn't necessarily have to be wireless carriers, there are many others…